Pure play OpenStack vendor Mirantis is every cloud commentators dream. They've got the perfect story - high growth, massive funding and sufficiently frequent newsworthy content to keep people entertained. In the past the dramas have revolved around Mirantis' strained relationship with Red Hat, things are moving up a notch today with the company throwing a barb in VMware's direction.
The news, as it stands, is that Mirantis is partnering with networking vendor Juniper to help deliver the networking aspects of an OpenStack deployment. The subtext is more interesting in that, ever since the purchase of networking vendor Nicira by VMware, and its re-branding to NSX, the OpenStack community has felt a little uncomfortable that they often rely on a VMware product for their OpenStack networking needs. Scaling OpenStack more broadly is hard, and Nicira (and later NSX) makes that easier, albeit at the expense of being in bed with VMware, a company that many open source players regard as the "evil empire".
The engineering partnership being announced today sees Juniper offer an alternative, open source software defined networking (SDN) fabric that can be used for OpenStack deployments - Mirantis OpenStack will interoperate with Juniper Contrail Networking, a standards-based SDN solution. As part of the integration, Mirantis OpenStack is inter-operable with OpenContrail, an open source version of Contrail. The companies have jointly published a reference architecture for the integrated offerings - the architecture is validated for Mirantis OpenStack 6.0.
The technical details of this deal are less important than the positioning ones - by throwing a barb in VMware's direction, Mirantis manages to stay front of mind in the marketplace. By partnering with Juniper, rather than a less well-known networking vendor, they continue to build their credibility with customers and prospects. This seems like a marketing masterstroke yet again.
Mirantis is a fascinating vendor - they seem to be growing very rapidly, indicating that there is both a market for production OpenStack and that enterprises really want the certainty that leveraging a third-party deployment partner can bring. I sometimes wonder about the long-term opportunity that Mirantis has here, but thus far everything seems to be going to plan for the company.
